Archive for March, 2012

In November, I started my personal prayerbook, a spiral-bound unlined notebook that I filled with the prayers from and for my community, written in a script called Kalash. To date, I have filled over a third of the book; I have just finished doing some major catch-up work that took me over an hour to record. (This means that, my siblings in Kemetic Orthodoxy, if you have requested prayers, I have prayed for you, even if I didn’t leave a comment in the forums.)

More interestingly, though, is that I’ve gone from simply scribing to making it a mini-ritual. Purification requirements are light – clean hands and a clean space – and the tools are simple: a candle, a single offering cup, and incense. I light the incense, light the candle, offer my Mother Nebt-het Her favorite drink, and leave a small bite of chocolate for Netjer. It’s all done at my computer desk instead of my altar; I need the computer to go through the prayer request forums.

And now, instead of simply writing the prayers, I write them and then speak aloud my requests, calling upon the Netjeru in my family to help. I realized, not too long ago, that I essentially have a god for every occasion with me, and it only makes sense to name Them when I pray for others. Nebt-het, guide of the dead, comforter of the mourning. Hethert-Nut, Who provides love and joy. Ma’ahes, protector and upholder of ma’at. Serqet, Who can help with any poison, be it mental, physical, or emotional. Sekhmet, Who is the patron lady of doctors, especially surgeons.

It feels very right to be maintaining my prayerbook this way, involving my gods and making it a mini-rite. I genuinely feel that doing this is an act done in Nebt-het’s name, and that brings me joy and a sense of responsibility and accomplishment.

Dua Netjer! May You hear the words of Your children and bless them.

As a genderfunky and pansexual individual myself, I have a special interest in mythological figures who are also queer in some fashion. To my pleasant surprise, we have several Egyptian gods, or Netjeru, Who have some queerness in Them. This post is meant to be a brief introductions to the ones I know.

Firstly, we have Nit, the Creatrix. Of the handful of primary creator deities in ancient Egypt, Nit was the only one said to be female, but all creator deities are to some extent genderfluid and/or genderless, being gods that have reproduced asexually through various means (masturbation, spit, intentional thought) to create the rest of the gods. Nit Herself, despite being hailed as a goddess, bears the epithet “The Mother and Father of All Things” and has been addressed as “Male Who made female; Female Who made male” at the temples of Esna. She is the God Who bore women and the Goddess Who bore men, and so within Herself contains all sexes, all genders. Nit is said to have created childbirth, and, when referred to as a creatrix, Her name is written with the hieroglyph of an ejaculating phallus. She has been referred to as the deity of the Nun (pronounced noon), the great primordial waters of creation, or as the Nun personified. Another snippet from the Esna inscription reads:

Wide water Who created eternity; water Who made everlastingness;
Who rose in Nun while earth was in darkness.
Living Ancestor, Who had Her origins in Nun, before the creation of Geb and the raising of Nut.
Genetrix, Cobra Who was at the beginning, Mother of time primordial, She Who created Her own birth…

(Geb is the god of the earth; Nut is the goddess of the sky.) For more about Nit, you can read the research I’ve compiled thus far.

Nit has also been identified with/as Nebt-het (Nephthys), Lady of Death. In ancient texts, Nebt-het has been described as being “an imitation woman with no vagina” because of Her barrenness, and She has no children with Her husband, Set, Lord of the Red Desert, which is a striking difference from most Kemetic triads of mother-father-child. Some modern Egyptologists have interpreted Nebt-het as being a lesbian; more to the point, She is sekhyt, a Kemetic word often translated as “eunuch” but more accurately indicates any person who doesn’t fit within the traditional gender roles of male or female, any person who is infertile, and/or a sexless/unsexed person.

That leads us to Nebt-het’s husband and consort, Set, God of Chaos. Set is a highly sexual god; He’s been lured off after Aset (Isis) in guise of a beautiful maiden before, and He’s also tried to seduce Heru-sa-Aset (Horus the Younger), both during the Contendings of Horus and Set, which is the tale of Who would become king after Wesir’s (Osiris’) death. Heru-sa-Aset, in turn, tricked Set into consuming some of His semen on lettuce, also as a part of the Contendings myth. Some Egyptologists suggest Set is strictly homosexual, but He would also be more suited to the term sekhyt, as He’s often considered sterile due to His association with the barren desert, over which He rules. Heru-sa-Aset may or may not be considered bisexual or sekhyt, depending on the source; He does go on to father the four Sons of Heru, showing that He is indeed fertile, but His actions with Set may suggest a bisexual inclination (or just an attempt to gain a political upper hand).

In addition, Hapi, god of the Nile, was a male deity associated with the fertility and life-giving powers of the Nile river; as a result, He was shown as a round-bellied man with full breasts. The breasts may have been symbolic, or He may have been considered a fully hermaphroditic deity, though He did still have a wife.

Fertility was a big deal in ancient Egypt and was the primary requisite for a person receiving the full privileges of womanhood or manhood, but even in the biggest myths, genderbending and alternate sexualities were represented; there’ve also been inscriptions in tombs indicating homosexual relations between men. (I don’t know of any between women; if you do, please share!) Set and Nebt-het, both important deities in Kemet, were sekhyt Netjeru, and all creator deities, especially Nit, held within Them both male and female qualities. If I’ve missed any queer Egyptian gods, please feel free to chime in, or add your opinions/experience with the gods mentioned here!

This post brought to you as part of the Pagan Blog Project.

long form

Hail Bast, Lady of the East,
Invisible Paw, Giving All Life.

May I hold infinite patience within my head
and endless compassion within my heart
as I live alongside Your children,
who are not the least of what is Yours,
though they are the smallest.

May I slow down.
May I remember to breathe.
May I treasure each moment,
each touch of fur,
each eager purr,
each sleeping face.

May I always know that it is I
who must hold the space
and provide the structure
that allows them to thrive.
May I always act mindfully
and with gentleness.

May I remember my heart-held duty
as caretaker, as caregiver,
to these who are part of my family,
and may I treat them with the same grace and love
with which You treat Your children,
human and feline alike.

…

short form

May I love my cats as Bast loves Her children.
May I care for my cats as Bast cares for Her children.

Feral is a big word. It means the long-term guest-cat living in our household, who has slowly learned what it means to not hiss and flee from any still object that’s even remotely animal- or person-shaped. It means all the cats and dogs living in urban and suburban areas without human caretakers. It means all the human-brought domesticized animals that got out into the countryside and went native– often ousting truly native species and wrecking ecosystem balance in the process.

Feral means non-human sometimes, or maybe just non-thinking. Instinctive, perhaps even intuitive. Feral is a word that evokes a sense of dangerousness, of unpredictability, of wildness. Feral can bite the hand that feeds and lick it tenderly not a minute later. Feral evades capture. Feral cannot be reached with logic, and only sometimes can it be tempered with the reliable structure that logic can build. One rehabilitates a feral animal in part by providing a secure, unchanging rhythm and structure until it learns it does not need to fear or aggress. Our half-feral girl has come from living on a closet shelf to sleeping on my stomach at night because she learned I don’t react when she hisses; I do not take advantage of her fear or vulnerability, and so I am not a threat. A non-threat may be lived with peaceably; a non-threat may even be trusted.

For me, the word feral overlaps with the word pagan. Both of them speak to less civilization and more nature, more blood and marrow and greenery and sickness and danger and risk. I do not romanticize old days with nonexistant roads, poor or no education, more primitive medicine and surgery, and frequently terrible human rights. But I do see the disconnect from wildness that exists in my urban, civilized, well-educated, sanitized world now. It can be very hard to be feral in healthy ways when everything around you is automated machinery and political maneuvering. It can be very hard to be nature-based pagan when everything around you is plastic and steel and pavement and glass.

I am in some ways feral, a human animal who has not lost its ties to instinct and flesh. I am sometimes-tame, domesticated enough to live in the world we have constructed, civil enough to wish for joy and abundance and love for all people, intelligent enough to understand compassion and justice and social contracts. But beneath this veneer of well-cultured humanity is still an animal seeking to survive the chaos of life in whatever way it can, and I react to trauma like my half-feral cat has reacted to her own, despite all my efforts at cultivating zen within myself.

I seek feralness in others. Most of the heart-deep friends I have understand the nature of the human animal and share it with me, bound to visceral experience and strong instinct and the sense of striving to live, even within our blessedly privileged and safe lives. Most of the gods I follow have feral natures– the keening kite, the roiling black sea, the sunning lion, the hunting lioness, the stinging scorpion, the roaming stallion. The poetry I write drips with imagery for all the senses, and the novels and short stories I craft feature creatures or monsters or shapeshifters of some sort far more often than humans. The media I consume – music, movies, books – revolve around the highlights of feral entities, the struggle to resolve feral nature with compassionate morals, glimpses of things that are not purely human. The martial art I study seeks to train the instinct to react appropriately, knowing the body can move so much more quickly than the mind in a hot situation, knowing the body is its own kind of animal.

I have said before that I love Celtic paganism and my Kemetic path in very different ways. Kemeticism is the sun upon my skin, the wind and light through clean branches, the warmth of the working day when words are said clearly and things are built strongly. But in Celticism are my roots, deep within the loamy soil, untouched by sight and light, coiling and winding, drinking deep of the world and its marrow, full of blood and spit and sweat and hairs. When I engage with Celtic gods and Celtic paganism, I do so as a feral human animal; when I act as a Kemetic, I do so from the higher faculties that I possess, logic and structure and order and reason. This does present unique challenges, such as finding it difficult to intellectually study Celtic history and mythos as I have Kemeticism, such as finding it difficult to interact with my human ancestors within a non-feral Kemetic framework. The dynamic between feral and not-feral feels like the twisting spiral of my very DNA, the centerpoint around which all of my work – physical, spiritual, and creative – revolves.

Much like I need both animal nature and human intelligence to call myself a human animal, I need both Celtic and Kemetic nourishment for my spirit to truly thrive.

This post brought to you as part of the Pagan Blog Project.

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This post brought to you as part of the Pagan Blog Project.

So, has anyone else ever meditated to Tool’s Parabol + Parabola?

Click here to hear both songs together.

parabol

so familiar, and overwhelmingly warm
this one, this form I hold now

embracing you, this reality here
this one, this form I hold now

so wide-eyed, and hopeful
wide-eyed, and hopefully wild

we barely remember
what came before this precious moment

choosing to be here, right now
hold on, stay inside

this body, holding me
reminding me that I am not alone

this body
makes me feel eternal
all this pain is an illusion

parabola

we barely remember who or what came before this precious moment
we are choosing to be here, right now
hold on, stay inside
this holy reality, this holy experience
choosing to be here in

this body
this body holding me
be my reminder here that I am not alone in
this body
this body holding me
feeling eternal, all this pain is an illusion

alive

in this holy reality, in this holy experience
choosing to be here in

this body
this body holding me
be my reminder here that I am not alone in
this body
this body holding me
feeling eternal, all this pain is an illusion

twirling ’round with this familiar parable
spinning, weaving ’round each new experience
recognize this as a holy gift and celebrate this
chance to be alive and breathing
a chance to be alive and breathing

this body holding me reminds me of my own mortality
embrace this moment
remember, we are eternal
all this pain is an illusion

When I was just getting into paganism, I created prayers to say on awakening and just before sleeping. It was a really enjoyable, beneficial habit, and I’m going to try to re-establish that. Here are the prayers I’ll be using, with some flexibility in the adjectives I choose and any specific gods I may mention.

…

morning

Good morning, Universe and all within it.
Thank You for my rest and my dreams
and for the zep-tepi of a new day.
May today be positive and productive;
may I walk with Ma’at in compassion and peace.
Kheperu, so may it become. Dua Netjer!

…

evening

Good night, Universe and all within it.
Thank You for all the good things of today
and for all the souls I am blessed to know.
May my sleep be restful, my dreams enjoyable,
and my awakening pleasant and timely.
Kheperu, so may it become. Dua Netjer!

This post is much more of a thought-seed than an essay, so please treat it as such; I lack conclusions. :)

In Hemet’s booklet Nebt-het: Lady of the House, she states:

Nebt-het, or nb.t-hw.t, means “lady of the house” or “lady of the mansion/temple,” as hw.t represents a more formal structure than does the usual pr, “house.”

…

Some Egyptologists suggest that the “house” in the name Nebt-het should have the same, celestial-oriented meaning as does the “house” (hw.t) in the name of the goddess Hethert (Greek Hathor, Kemetic hwt-hr), but Nebt-het does seem to have a very intimate connection with humanity and not just the sky. In this regard, I believe the celestial component is interesting … but unnecessary for an understanding of Her nature.

Given that my Mothers are Nebt-het Herself and Hethert-Nut, Hethert-as-the-sky, Hethert-the-Celestial-Cow, I am quite interested in this potential connection created by the hw.t, “-het,” in both Their names.

And since yesterday was a holy day for Tasenetnofret, The Good Sister, Whose name is one of Nebt-het’s epithets and yet Who is a form of Hethert, well…

I have to wonder where these two great goddesses might touch or even overlap each other. Nebt-het, goddess of death, guide to the souls of the passed and comforter to those mourning, and Hethert, lady of joy and love and music, in Her form of Hethert-Nut, the great cow of the night sky, upholder of the Sun Himself. Netjeru of the firmaments and all the souls and stars within them. Perhaps it was even Hethert-Nut Herself Who established that the house of the gods was within the sky, when She lifted Ra away from humanity on Earth so that He could watch from a safe distance.

And where Hemet mentions Nebt-het’s intimate connection to humanity, well, I cannot say that Hethert lacks such a connection – She, the Lady of love and pleasure and happiness, which we humans seek out and delight in! Hethert, Who ancient Egyptians praised as one of their foremost goddesses! And if Hethert is still a sky goddess in Her own right, especially in Her name of Hethert-Nut, then surely Nebt-het can also be part of the heavens without being distant from us. Besides, Nebt-het has been an Eye of Ra before, a fierce daughter of the sun, and all the Eyes have always been celestial, too.

So, perhaps it is not such a far stretch to see that Hethert-Nut and Nebt-het can meet in the darkness and depth of the sky, these ladies of life and death, sun and shadow.

edited to add:

According to the 2010 edition of the Nebt-het booklet mentioned above, there is, in fact, a syncretization of these goddesses! Hethert-Nebthet is listed as a Hierakonpolis Netjeru, and Nebthet-Hethert is the Lady of the House of the Sistrum, one of the Seven Hetherts/Hathors. The latter is especially fascinating to me, given that Nebt-het was the first deity I ever played music for, let alone created original music for!

And, from the preface to the 2010 edition, I now find these very relevant lines:

Nebt-het is the Lady of the House. The House is the sky, the place where ancestors shine down from as the twinkling stars, to watch all we do and guide us through our human lives.

Indeed, it looks like the sky is the common ground for Nebt-het, Hethert, and Nut, all the ladies Whom I call Mother. :)

Guys, I can’t tell you how pleased with and proud of this one I am. This is pretty much the best painting I have done to date. The black, gold (around the pincers), and bronze (around the stinger) are all metallic; the red and white are matte. It is gorgeous in person.

It is a gift for Meket, a daughter of Serqet and a spiritual sibling in the Kemetic Orthodoxy. She has seen it and loves it, so I’ll be shipping it off to her very soon. =3

To my friends and my kindred spirits, if you ever want any art from me, know that I absolutely love doing this and that you should never hesitate to ask. ♥

Hail Bast, coming forth from the shrine, I do not eat my heart.

~ Purification 13 from the Papyrus of Ani

Eating one’s heart is a distinctly Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) phrase. It comes from the Papyrus of Ani, which has a list of 42 “negative confessions” or “declarations of purity”, all with references to various Netjeru (gods) or netjeri (spirits). It’s a list meant to convey that the person speaking (who is dead and preparing for his/her heart to be weighed against Ma’at’s feather) is pure and has not commited isfet.

Isfet is a word that does not directly translate to evil, but that’s a pretty close approximation; to do isfet is to do bad, to create negativity, to harm, to act or speak maliciously, to lie. Where ma’at is the force of balance, rightness, and harmony, isfet is the force of uncreation, imbalance, and badness. (Ma’at capitalized is the goddess embodying the concept; ma’at lowercase is the concept itself.)

As Rev. Tamara Siuda, founder of Kemetic Orthodoxy, states in her booklet The 42 Purifications:

The heart (ib), being the symbolic place of emotions, memories and conscience for a person, is a very important body center …

…

To eat one’s heart is to starve oneself of ma’at, to turn in upon the self until there is nothing left but an empty, worthless husk.

Heart-eating is a concept that I’ve been wanting to explore. With that, please understand that this post is mostly my inferring and extrapolating upon the idea, rather than citing the interpretation(s) of modern Kemetics. If you have your own insight to add, please do!

To eat one’s heart is to damage oneself and so create isfet. Self-harming actions and thoughts, self-deprecating words and thoughts, and deliberate neglect of one’s wellness of any level are all things that I would consider as eating one’s heart. I would not consider disorders or physiological imbalances, like clinical depression, to be eating one’s heart; skewed brain chemicals are not a choice, and I believe the creation of isfet is a choice, not a consequence of mistakes or ignorance. However, what you do with your situation – be it an unexpected negative event or having to deal with something like depression – is where you can promote ma’at or create isfet. While we cannot control the fact that a shitty situation exists, we can control how we respond to it, however hard that may be.

Condemning oneself, kicking oneself for being imperfect or making mistakes, self-hatred, self-harm, self-deprecating– these are all actions that create isfet, all examples of eating one’s heart. But acts of self-care, compassion, understanding, tolerance, gentleness, self-strength, and patience? These promote ma’at and go a long way towards nourishing one’s heart and feeding one’s spirit.

This post brought to you as part of the Pagan Blog Project.

I place myself in the center of the turning world;
the center is still.

~ A Pagan Ritual Prayer Book, Ceisiwr Serith

May the dark places in my spirit
be only the folds in Nebt-het’s cloak.

May the dark places in my heart
be only the fields in Hethert-Nut’s starry sky.

May the dark places in my body
be only the marrow of Ma’ahes’ bones.

May the dark places in my mind
be only the shadow of Serqet’s upraised tail.

May the dark places in my life
be only the dusk before Sekhmet’s dawning.

May I remember that darkness
only exists where there is also light.

Dua Netjer!

Terminology Note: In this post, I will refer to “totemism” instead of “shamanism.” I want to talk specifically about totemism as a practice of learning from and studying the archetypal and mundane properties of animals – this includes an animal’s mythological characteristics, as well as the lessons it can teach us by virtue of understanding its real-life behaviors and physiology. If I reference source material or an author with whom you do not agree, please know that all learning is a process, and we do go through some less-useful things on our way to finding the more-useful. :)

…

When I was younger, digging into Wicca and gradually learning more about earth-based spiritualities, I stumbled into totemism. I was absolutely enthusiastic, having spent my entire not-that-long-yet life loving and learning about animals. I devoured Ted Andrews’ Animal Speak and quickly hopped into more traditional totemism through Michael Harner’s The Way of The Shaman. I swam from AnimalSpirits.com to Wildspeak.com, and I dove into practicing totemism happily and heartily. I discovered the value of studying the original myths to garner my own meanings, rather than just using someone else’s bulleted list, and learning the zoology of each animal to come to my own conclusions about what it could teach and, in turn, what I might learn from it. I combined interacting with that species in spirit and, where possible, in person, with hard research and personal shapeshifting practices, and it was (and is!) a wonderful thing for me.

But this post isn’t about totemism in general.

At some point, my exuberant love for dinosaurs overlapped with my fascination with totemism. I wondered: Would it be possible to know an extinct animal as a totem? Not just recently extinct, like the Barbary lion who is gone from the wild or the thylacine who is gone from everywhere, not even like the cave hyena that died out some 11,000 years ago. But extinct for millions of years, well beyond any possibility of recovering myth or behavioral records that can give us some base from which to leap in studying them.

For, in my methodry, without myth or fact, what could I learn that would help me understand the species and its spirit?

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a paleontologist. I wanted to bring these long-dead animals that so intrigued and thrilled me back to life. And that urge is still strong with me, even after spawning the related urge to create diverse, believable, fictional alien/fantasy creatures. The idea of being able to, somehow, access the spirit of these animals and learn from it, even just a little bit, is incredibly enthralling. For a brief moment in my past self’s excitement, I entertained the idea of trying to make this A Project – to devote years of myself to approaching and studying dinosaurs and other extinct species in hopes of developing a totem-like relationship with them. I thought that I might be able to learn enough, research enough, to write a book on it. At the time (and at the present, to my knowledge), no one had done that. I wanted to.

I did not. I figured it was scientifically futile and metaphysically laughable. Who was I, some well-meaning kid, to try to become a scholar and a spiritual ambassador? When I was thinking about dinosaurs as totems, the idea that they weren’t cold-blooded was still a new and crazy thing among paleontologists.

But things have come a very long way since then, in a relatively short amount of time. We know more about dinosaurs than ever before. We’ve found records of pigment and impressions of feathers. We’re rebuilding better and more solid theories about their behaviors, rooted in recent finds and extrapolations based on living species’ patterns. We’re constantly discovering new things and adapting what we thought we knew.

So, I wonder: With more accurate dinobiology and a growing body of modern dinosaur mythology, would it be possible to…?

This post brought to you as part of the Pagan Blog Project.